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thefickler writes "The Pacific Ocean trash dump is twice the size of Texas, or the size of Spain combined with France. The Pacific Vortex, as it is sometimes called, is made up of four million tons of plastic. Now, there's a proposal to turn this dump into 'Recycled Island.' The Netherlands Architecture Fund has provided the grant money for the project, and the WHIM architecture firm is conducting the research and design of Recycled Island. One of the three major aims of the project is to clean up the floating trash by recycling it on site. Two, the project would create new land for sustainable habitation complete with its own food sources and energy sources. Lastly, Recycled Island is to be a seaworthy island. While at the moment the project is still more or less a pipe dream, it's great that someone is trying to work out what to do with one of humanity's most bizarre environmental slip-ups."

As a whole yes, but there's a great deal of variety. Here in Seattle we're the only major city in the nation to actually be in compliance to the Kyoto protocol and we've made great strides at reducing the water consumption. We use less water now than we did 20 years ago, even though the population has gone up significantly since then. We also lead the nation in gas mileage.

The greatest problem with the gyre is that the plastic in question is untold quadrillions of tiny, sometimes microscopic, bits of plastic that have broken down under UV light and descended somewhere in the water column. You would need to filter several meters deep to filter all the garbage out.

Of course, bean counters will kill this because it's unprofitable, and everyone else will ignore it because it's so far out to sea.

Well... scientists and engineers are able to filter micro-organisms (which are microscopic, and almost the same density as water - similar to our problem here)out of water , also when it's quite diluted. I am sure there's a way to get the tiny bits out.

The basic question is what the concentrated waste is worth per metric ton. If it's worth 1000 euro / ton, then quite a lot is possible... but it's gonna be an expensive island. If it's only 10 euro/ton, then the island is cheap, but only the crude bits will b

(a) Yes it is. Or rather, it occupies one: The North Pacific Gyre [wikipedia.org].
(b) Yes they are. According to the first link in TFA:

The tiny pieces of plastic are “the size of a grain of rice”, small enough to be eaten by fish. Chemicals, like “PCBs, DDT, and other toxins” that don’t dissolve in water are soaked up by the plastic. Those toxic chemicals get ingested by the fish eating the tiny pieces of plastic. Those fish are eaten by bigger fish that absorb the chemicals from the smaller fish. Ultimately, the contaminated fish may wind up on your dinner tables. We already know how dangerous these chemicals can be when ingested.

(c) If the plastic is indeed spread throughout the top several meters, then yes, there is.

The first story I read about the patch made it sound like it was bordering on becoming an island on its own... an area the size of texas made of milk bottles and grocery bags, all rustling against each other in the waves. No other article I've seen has been that bad, but all of them making it sound much worse than it actually is.

I'm certainly not going to defend a vast region of polluted ocean and poisonous chemicals, but here's what Wikipedia has to say:
"the patch is not visible from satellite photography since it primarily consists of suspended particulates in the upper water column. Since plastics break down to ever smaller polymers, concentrations of submerged particles are not visible from space, nor do they appear as a continuous debris field. Instead, the patch is defined as an area in which the mass of plastic debris in the upper water column is significantly higher than average."

Moore's claim of having discovered a large, visible debris field is, however, a mischaracterization of the polluted region overall, since it primarily consists of particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye."
"A similar patch of floating plastic debris is found in the Atlantic Ocean."

It really doesnt sound terribly island-able. I'm sure you can scoop up enough solid material to build something, but you may have to drag a net for a couple of thousand zig-zagging miles to do it.

It is kind of bad in some ways, there are always little pieces of plastic floating up on the beaches in Hawaii. I haven't noticed that problem so much in, say, California. I heard there are effects like killing birds and stuff, but to selfish me the worst part was plastic pieces washing up on the beach. Kind of ugly.

The reality of it is a lot worse than most people imagine. Instead of easily manageable, solid chunks of plastic it's in the form of tons of tiny particles. This makes cleanup extremely difficult as well as makes the plastic much more lethal to wildlife. Animals try to eat the colorful bits, mistaking them for natural food sources: http://coastalcare.org/wp-content/images/issues/pollution/plastic/bird-carcass.jpg [coastalcare.org]

A study of marine debris near the center of the gyre as part of the Southern California Water Research Project found 334,271 pieces of plastic per square kilometer with a weight of 5.1 kilograms per square kilometer.[3]. If this 11.2 lb/km found near the center were the same throughout its estimated 20 million square kilometers expanse, the gyre would contain 225 million pounds or 113,000 tons of plastic waste. This is less than some estimates of from three to 100 million tons of plastic in the gyre.

4000000 tons of floating plastic is at least 4000000 m^3 in volume, which would
allow to build a nice plastberg with dimensions 10x400x1000 m. This is
a severe underestimate, so there is gotta be a way to make it into a floating
plastic island with the area of about 1 km^2. Then we can throw some dirt on top and
declare it an international wild-life preserve.

It isn't for big things like people. For little things that eat invertebrates the same size, it is a crisis. The plastic pieces are "feeding" the bottom of the food chain. Except that they don't have any nutritional value, and poison or choke up the stuff eating them. From a strictly concentration point of view, it's not overly scary. From a biological point of view, it is.

Down to more tangible scale, it is roughly 3 grams per square meter. A typical cube of sugar is roughly 4 grams. Now consider that's just surface area, not volume. You're not going to be able to see much of it even if you're swimming in it.

I don't really understand your reasoning. The patch wouldn't be as bad if it were actual plastic things that one could somehow remove. The fact that the plastic has broken down into small particles is worse than what most people seem to imagine; the way it is now, it can enter into the food chain, and there is no reasonable way to remove it. Your logic seems to be "Wikipedia says it's invisible, so it can't be too bad." How does it being invisible make it any better?

So the stories don't make it sound worse than it is; they make it sound better than it actually is!

If the particles were chemically neutral, and harmless to see life it wouldn't be a problem at all, but I gather that the creatures in the area are greatly affected. The problem I have with most "Garbage Patch" reporting is more that they feel the need to "sex it up". The serious people of the world are capable of have care for and concern over environmental disasters that are invisible to the naked eye, but stories about the patch always seem directed at the same people who keep trying to pass 5-cent plastic bag taxes. It's become a mythical beast, a chimera whose dread legend is spread in whispers by folks who would probably be comfortable banning cars, but want no part of pebble-bed reactors.

I think (and I'm trying to clarify my own thoughts here, as well, instead of ranting ad-hominem, as I have been) that a lot of people see the mind's-eye seascape of bags and bottles of consumer and commercial excess, and the horrors of a throwaway culture.

The reality, as always, is more nuanced. Plastic bags and styrofoam cups a) go a long way toward reducing many other types of waste in our society, and b) will never go away, because they're so damn useful. Instead of railing against the very human behaviors that have created the problem or the very useful products that improved our lives tremendously for the last 60 years, we should probably focus on creating materials that break down more safely after they wind up in the ocean, or focus on our garbage gathering techniques, or hell, a couple thousand extremely expensive machines that sit in the Pacific and try to clean as much water as possible. Even that scenario is more likely than the societal changes that would be required to alleviate the patch.

This story also reminds me of the women who recently spent three days walking around in pink shirts to raise awareness of breast cancer. They blocked traffic extremely frequently, often appointing themselves crossing guards in areas that already had lights, giving each other permission to walk in front of cars while people tried to get to and from work.

I certainly sympathize with them. I know a lot of them have lost friends and family, and they want to do something for the cause... but honestly, we're all aware of breast cancer. All of that pink shirt money, time-off-of-work money, organizational money, etc could have gone toward research. Or it could have just not gotten in my way for three days, and I think we would have all been better off. If one person had been carrying a donation bucket for research, I would have felt a hundred times better about it.

So they're building an island and making a symbolic effort at cleaning? Fantastic, I never drive through the Pacific ocean on the way to work. But they aren't making a dent in the problem, everyone with a pulse already knows about pollution, and they're misrepresenting the one problem they're even engaging in.

Actually solving actual problems usually takes a lot of money, a lot of cooperation, and and a lot of work. It isn't showy, and chicks won't think you're hot for doing it. Not everybody involved in it gets to be a manager, or collect a paycheck from their non-profit employer, or be interviewed by the local news while they hold a sign that gives heart disease a severe textual talking-to.

And I know a lot of people are doing that kind of work somewhere, but the campaigns that make the news are always awareness, or people who want to -feel- like they're fighting the good fight.

This is not something that just happened one day because someone made a mistake. It's the result of decades of carelessness and ignorance.We can be only happy that the stuff accumulates all in one place so we have at least the hint of a chance to fix it.

I have heard of this huge mass in the Pacific Ocean for quite some time now.
But I never seem to be able to find actual pictures or satellite images of this "Double the size of Texas" island.
The only images I ever see are ones that show land mass on the horizon. Which means images that are NOT in the middle of the pacific Ocean.
Won't someone help a skeptic out?

It's not visible, even when you're in the middle of it. It's tiny (mostly microscopic) pieces of plastic in the top several metres in higher concentrations than elsewhere. You need special instruments to detect it.

I'm unsure if "skeptic" is the right term, but a quick jaunt to Wikipedia ought to help. To summarize: it's a large area of the ocean where the concentration of plastic particles is significantly higher than normal. Most of the particles are too small to see and are essentially dissolved into the ocean. There are some bits of visible garbage floating along, but the patch still looks and acts very much like normal ocean.

It doesn't exist in the form that is being presented in articles such as this. The numbers given by North Atlantic Garbage Patch page on wikipedia are "200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometre". This translates into one piece every 5 square meters. Keep in mind that in general these are broken down pieces (cm^2 scale or smaller). So, you won't find any pictures, because it probably isn't possible to take one that looks like anything. That having been said, the increased concentration of plastics is pro

As I understand it, this is an area in the Pacific Ocean where floating plastic bits accumulate due to ocean currents. In this area, the amount of plastic per unit area of ocean is far higher than in the rest of the ocean. However, the density the plastic bits is not remotely island like. You would likely not be able to see it from satellite photos. The best way to see it would be to sail there. and then to drag a fine screen behind the boat. When you pull in the screen, you would find quite a few litt

I heard it described that way.... You wouldn't necessarily see it by flying overhead, but if you were in the "soup" apparently, you would have very small plastic particles all around you - I forget how deep - maybe 5 feet or so? I can't recall correctly.

You won't really see a picture because only the water in a glass jar would then look "funky." I believe the article I read about it did have samples of different parts of the "island" and you could definitely see the little particles... So like

This all sounds like a great idea, but from what I've gathered, the mass isn't really solid enough to make anything out of it. The logical conclusion is that we need more plastic.

As a general rule, I have tended to throw my plastic into landfills. I figure that, if time lasts long enough, someday they may provide us with (potentially kid-friendly and bouncy) mountains. However, seeing that science has granted us this new frontier, I suppose that I should be throwing my plastic out to sea.

... to where this supposed "dump" was located, and only found small pieces of broken-down plastics, and no massive dump like the article indicates?
Seems there was a documentary done about this "dump" being an exaggeration, and over-hyped in the news.

Well the article (and other articles on the subject) are all very counter productive. They all suggest massive mounds of floating trash because it's easier for human minds to picture those as evil. This downplays the fact that the real danger are the chemical-laden particles of plastic being eaten by wildlife and entering the food chain. In other words, in trying to build people up into some kind of frothing state of hysteria, the people behind these articles are detracting from the issue and giving sceptics an easy out at the same time.

What is so bizarre? We manufacture plastic, make products out of it and carelessly throw the used products into the ocean where they disintegrate into little bits that accumulate over time. Sad and disgusting, but not bizarre.

Most of the flotsam there consists of small particles that are distributed in the first 10m of the water column. What would need to be done is to filter it out and bind it similar to how pebbles are bound with cement to create concrete to create large enough bits that can be combined into an island.

Eventually we (the world community) will have to clear this patch as the plastics now enter the food chain and threaten to poison us all. Already there are areas in the ocean where plastic is more prevalent than krill and plastic is being ingested by marine animals, accumulating in higher organisms and ultimately in us too.

Collecting plastic there would be a nice occupation for all those fishermen that have been made redundant due to overfishing and the necessities to conserve fish stocks. Get them to fish plastic instead and pay them for the trash catch they return.

Maybe I'm old (I do have a birthday coming up this weekend), but: Back from when I was a kid, I remember a few things about the environment:

1. First, at a young age, it was totally appropriate to throw garbage out of the car window.

2. It then became less appropriate as volunteers started making a lot of press about cleaning up litter on roadways, which (presumably) had previously been left to be mowed into tiny pieces and otherwise never degraded (plastics last forever, don't you know?).

They are saying that there are 4 million tons of plastic out there, and they want to build a 10,000 square km island.

Assume a basic building unit of a plastic floating barrel and a square plastic platform to sit on top of it. Assume that 40kg of plastic are used in the barrel/platform and it will provide all of the necessary flotation for a square meter chunk of island.

In the above scenario, 4 million tons of plastic gets you one hundred million barrel/platform units, and therefore a surface area of one hundred million square meters. That means an island that is TEN square km. Not really enough land to make self sufficient home complete with farmland for half a million people.

What are they going to build the other 9,990 square km of floating island out of?

Assume a basic building unit of a plastic floating barrel and a square plastic platform to sit on top of it. Assume that 40kg of plastic are used in the barrel/platform and it will provide all of the necessary flotation for a square meter chunk of island.

Remember that your barrel is built of plastic which breaks down in seawater and sunlight. You'll have to keep replacing barrels.

They're not saying they will build the island from the plastic. They saying they'll build the island where the plastic is.

Actually they are saying that they will build it from plastic that they recycle from the ocean.

from their website, www.recycledisland.com:

On this location a new floating island will be made of all the recycled material found in the Ocean. This recycled island will be in the heart of the Oceans current, the North Pacific Gyre. In between the island Hawaii and San Francisco.

Starting point is to make Recycled island a similar size as (the main island of) Hawaii. This size is approximately 10,000 Km2. Of course the size depends on the amount of plastic that we can obtain and recycle from the ocean.

There has to be a cash value for waste plastic. It is hard to understand why this plastic can not be scooped up and either turned into new plastic items or turned into fuel. I do notice that recycled plastic lumber is too expensive for most people yet railroad ties are now being made of recycled plastic so it must be possible to deliver plastic boards into the hands of home owners at a reasonable price. That plastic lumbar looks great and handl

I guess the issues are removing tiny particles of widely distributed plastic from an area of the ocean twice the size of Texas while at the same time not removing everything living from said ocean. Apparently most of the particles are no bigger than a grain of rice, so any system to sieve them out of the ocean would likely scoop up anything larger than plankton. I've not heard any specifics about how they plan to perform the separation.

I've noticed that if you throw something into a water body, like a lake or an ocean, that the next day you come back and it's gone. So somehow it takes it away and filters it through and it just cleans it up like a garbage compactor or whatever, so it's not really littering if you ask me.
- Ricky, Trailer Park Boys

Hundreds of years ago it seemed like lunacy to dry out land with big fans, but the Dutch figured out a way to do this. Only a pessimist can say in this preliminary stage that they'll definitely fail in this scheme.

And if pessimists were the drivers of technology, we'd still be living in caves and calling science magic.

This sounds like the greatest delivery system for recycling ever conceived. I can dump my trash into a river and it will eventually end up being recycled on an island in the middle of the Pacific. All transportation taken care of by Mother Nature.

The Pirate bay was looking to form a nation not long ago. I think they'd be interested in maintaining a plastic "country", whether or not the real scientists are interested in sticking around. And frankly, at the rate we're contributing to the vortex, they will probably grow over time.

It seems the problem with a lot of this particular type of plastic is that it's made to degrade quickly and it's literally disintegrating in the ocean, so a similar project (without heavy re-processing of the plastic) is not feasible. Still, with four million tons of it up for grabs I'm surprised people are dragging their feet over collecting it.

All plastic is biodegradable, being organic... the main problem with it is that the majority of it takes a VERY long time to do so. Another problem is that the stuff that does degrade somewhat more quickly tends to degrade in to some not so nice things to have floating around. (actually to be more strictly accurate, it's usually the additives to the plastic being released during degradation that are bad)

From the article: "The island would be built where the trash is located and would convert the waste onsite".

Read on:

Cleaning it up is going to cost a lot of money and require a great deal of either scooping up the plastic and shipping it back to shore, or some sort of onsite recycling for building something like Recycled Island.

And how do you propose making a concentration of individual pieces of plastics, chemicals, and other misc objects all heavier than water? And then not revive due to ocean currents bringing in more plastics from outside regardless?

Seems more sensible to make it all heavier than water and sink it. Once it's on the bottom natural sedimentation processes will bury it for good.

Why would you do that when, for equal effort, you could make a self-sustaining self-powering island from it? One that you can then sell or lease out real-estate on for ridiculous prices, because it's the only remaining unpopulated temperate coastline in the world?

The plastic and other debris will get gathered either way. The difference is that one way you either melt into blocks and sink it or ship it to a landfill, and the other way you go through the massive money and energy expenditure to convert it into building materials and assemble it on site into a floating recycled modern utopia.

As well intentioned as this proposal is, we will never, ever get to the point where the cheapest source of building materials is a contain

I think the implication is that once you've gathered the stuff and made a big block of molten plastic, it's trivial and very cheap to turn it into a flotation tank. It's the initial manufacturing step that's the hard bit, and if (big 'if', I agree) you can make it in the first place, you might as well make it into real estate instead of boat anchors.

It does not look sufficiently impressive on film. A degraded bottle every few tens if not hundred meters does not make a good photo op. There is also a lot of dispersed plastic in the water itself. However, it is not something which you can picture, post and shout: "See how we ravished the Earth". Definitely nothing that can make the same kind of statement like a picture of a pelican dipped in BP produce.

I've watched several specials about the Gyre including the one you linked - NONE of them show anything like the picture you linked which I suspect was taken elsewhere and not in open water. It's not good and probably pretty bad but sadly it's not picture fantastic else you better believe the CNNs of the world would be going nutz to photo it much as they have the birds BP has harmed...

They bring this up because it gives them an excuse to bitch about consumer culture, and another sensationalist argument for people in the west to adopt their joyless granola-eating, back-to-the-earth ways.

Joyless? You need to get out more.

But to those who don't get it, I hear if one keeps repeating, "Cheeseburgers love me! They do!" then it is possible to dull the mind and keep up the farce of 'living' for another day.

Problems will not be solved via engineering because those in a position to task out such projects are all psychopathic loons who will never see the light. (Note how BP's solution seems to revolve around turning the Gulf region into a corporate police state rather than fixing or cleaning anyt